The Birth of Modern London: The Development and Design of the City, 1660-1720 (Studies in Design and Material Culture) - Softcover

Mckellar, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0719040760 ISBN 13: 9780719040764

Publisher: Manchester University Press, 1999

Synopsis

The period 1660–1720 saw the foundation of modern London. The city was transformed post-Fire from a tight warren of medieval timber-framed buildings into a vastly expanded, regularised landscape of brick houses laid out in squares and spacious streets. This book examines the building boom and the speculative developers who created that landscape. It offers a wealth of new information on their working practices, the role of craftsmen and the design thinking which led to the creation of a new prototype for English housing.

While concentrating on the mass-produced houses of 'the middling sort', which saw the adoption of classicism on a large scale in this country for the first time, the book reveals that the 'new city' maintained a surprising degree of continuity with existing patterns of urban use and traditional architecture. It presents the late-seventeenth and the early eighteenth century as a distinct phase in London's architectural development and offers a radical reinterpretations of the adoption of Renaissance styles and ideas at the level of the everyday, challenging conventional interpretations of their use and reception in this country.

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About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth McKellar is Emerita Professor of Art History at the Open University and President of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain -- .

Edition details

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0719040760
• ISBN 13: 9780719040764
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272